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A Firefox question: My installation became corrupted and would not allow Cookie to delete cookies nor allow me to delete bookmarks. I had to reinstall from scratch. Unfortunately, Firefox Sync has added back some old extensions that no longer work (those associated with disconnect.me). They are listed in the Disabled Extensions part of the Add-ons page, with red banners and marked "Disconnect could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled".

So I want to remove them. The ellipsis next to them does not have a 'remove' option, only "Report' and 'More Information'. The latter takes you to a Mozilla support page explaining why they were disabled and says, via a link to a further page, that they can be removed by selecting 'Remove' from the ellipsis menu. Grrr!

Restarting in Safe Mode doesn't change anything - I still have no remove option. I tried to go to the Firefox add-ons website and enable Disconnect there, but it remains disabled with no remove option. I have visited
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/my_profile/Extensions
and identified the two extensions (0KB each) I have to get rid of and deleted them, but they still show on the add-ons page. I know they are disabled and harming nothing, but now I'm irritated! How can I get rid of them?

...

Addendum: Fixed! With Firefox quit, I moved the file extensions.json out of my profile folder and restarted Firefox. The zombie extensions are gone!

The saga continued, I'm afraid to say. I went through several iterations of a nuke and pave of my Firefox installation, with the following symptoms regularly re-appearing after a fresh installation:

1. Loss of suggestions from history when typing in the address bar​

2. Zombie bookmarks re-appearing, unable to delete them​

3. Failure of exporting bookmarks with just folder titles in the exported html file​

4. Complete failure of bookmark export to html - no file being written​

5. Cookie 5 unable to detect or delete new unwanted cookies.​

I found out that history and bookmarks are stored in places.sqlite in the profile folder, so I suspected it was being corrupted. Replacing it with an older version from Time Machine cured all the above.

I checked with Russell at sweetpproductions.com, and he confirmed that Cookie 5 does write to the places.sqlite file and that doing so with the browser open could corrupt it. So, now I have Cookie 5 set to delete unwanted cookies only on browser quit for Firefox (other browsers allow timed cookie deletion with the browser open with no ill-effects) and have been problem-free for 36 hours. (I also took a copy of my clean fresh profile folder so I can replace it if any issues come up again.)

So, if you use Cookie 5 with Firefox, watch out for this and set it not to delete when the browser is open!

MacInTouch

Folks who enjoy living on the bleeding edge may want to try out test builds of OmniWeb 6 for Mac, a new version of the old web browser from the venerable software company that started on Steve Jobs's NeXT platform:

Folks who enjoy living on the bleeding edge may want to try out test builds of OmniWeb 6 for Mac, a new version of the old web browser from the venerable software company that started on Steve Jobs's NeXT platform:

Unfortunately, the build posted there is almost a year old and has serious issues (for myself and numerous other people) with Mojave 10.14.4 and newer.

OmniWeb has been a primary browser of mine since I purchased it along with the other Omni apps at MacWorld New York in 2000.

Perhaps with enough support (the kind with $ preceding them), we can convince Omni to resurrect development. It's been, for a number of years, a labor of love by their CEO rather than a commercial product/project.

I don't think this is related to the issue above, but I am beginning to feel doomed with respect to Firefox, trying to log into Flickr, using my updated credentials rather than the old Yahoo login.

This works in Safari, so no problem with e-mail and password. Try in Firefox, and I get the "Oops, something went wrong." dialog. Disable Firefox's content blocking and disable extensions that might interfere (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, HTTPS Everywhere) - same problem. Restarts with all add-ons disabled - same problem. Empty the cache, remove old Flickr cookies, still no dice.

But here's the thing: if I open a private browsing window, in which the above extensions are active, and Firefox's content blocking is active, I can log in. This must mean something, but I'm at a loss to know what!

It is probably related, but you'd have to ask the developer to know for sure. I think he would still strongly recommend not removing cookies when the browser is open.

To get around this, when I get the pop-up that says 'You have read your three free articles this month', I quit the browser and re-open it. I have it set to re-open the pages that were open at quit (Preferences: General: Startup: Restore Previous Session) to minimise the clicks required to get me back where I wanted to be!

At some point the Safari browser lost its cache clearing function. Now when I need to purge cache, because Safari messes up on sites like Netflix, Hulu and various other streaming sites, requiring only a cache purge to fix, not a purge of all my saved data, I still have to lose login and history data.

Is there a way to clear the cache in a simple way without losing data? (I think I'll dig into the library and experiment with deleting Safari cache "manually".)

There is also Cookie from SweetP Productions that will give you an "empty cache" option as well as options to delete tracking cookies, set favorite sites, etc. I have used it for years. Available in the App Store.

I was curious about this and tried the same sequence suggested by M Young... only to learn that not only cache but favicons, logins, and more were flushed. So this is not the solution that John H is seeking, as he wants to preserve some of the data.

That's odd, because I regularly 'Empty Caches' in Safari and have never lost logins or anything else for that matter. What I have seen is RAM utilization go way down at times, depending on how long it was since I last flushed the caches.

I notice nowadays that Safari has trouble with multiple downloads of larger files — perhaps the originating web site is the issue, I am not sure. But I find more often than not, now, when checking the download queue for status, that one or more of a set of large files has quit (even at speeds of 30 megabytes per second and over).

Just got a notice on my Mac that a Safari 13.0 update was available, so I upgraded to that. Now I find out that Safari 13.0 requires me to use 1Password 7. I tried the 1Password 7 option a few months ago but decided to stick with 1Password 6. I would have never done the Safari update if it had told me in advance that I would lose access to 1Password.

Just got a notice on my Mac that a Safari 13.0 update was available, so I upgraded to that. Now I find out that Safari 13.0 requires me to use 1Password 7. I tried the 1Password 7 option a few months ago but decided to stick with 1Password 6. I would have never done the Safari update if it had told me in advance that I would lose access to 1Password.

Step 0: if you were auto-updated, turn all that stuff off, e.g., in Mojave turn off Automatically keep my Mac up to date in System Preferences > Software Update. (The fine points of the Advanced button are not covered here.)

(Method 1 of 3)
If you have a Time Machine backup, restore it from there.

My understanding is that Safari 13 will remove support for 'Legacy Safari Extensions'. So if you use Safari, you'll be reliant on the pretty awful options in the App Store for ad blocking. I have tried (ie paid) for two of them and they don't do a good job at all, and certainly don't remove YouTube ads. I'm not planning to install Catalina, so I'll stay with Safari 12 and uBlock Origin.

I tried to restore the previous version of Safari via Time Machine and get a "cannot remove or modify Safari as it is part of Mac OS" error. I tried to rename Safari to "make room" for the older version, but I am unable to do this either; I am "Administrator", so some other permissions are needed.

How do I work around this?

Update: I used Pacifist to extract Safari 12.1.2 for the Mohave Installer; how do I put it in the Applications Folder since I can't "move or alter" the newer Safari?

MacInTouch

Safari Extensions
Legacy Safari Extensions (.safariextz files) built with Safari Extension Builder are not supported in Safari 13 on macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, or macOS High Sierra. The Safari Extensions Gallery for legacy extensions will no longer be available in September, 2019.

I tried to restore the previous version of Safari via Time Machine and get a "cannot remove or modify Safari as it is part of Mac OS" error. I tried to rename Safari to "make room" for the older version, but I am unable to do this either; I am "Administrator", so some other permissions are needed.

How do I work around this?

Update: I used Pacifist to extract Safari 12.1.2 for the Mohave Installer; how do I put it in the Applications Folder since I can't "move or alter" the newer Safari?

Just got a notice on my Mac that a Safari 13.0 update was available, so I upgraded to that. Now I find out that Safari 13.0 requires me to use 1Password 7. I tried the 1Password 7 option a few months ago but decided to stick with 1Password 6. I would have never done the Safari update if it had told me in advance that I would lose access to 1Password.

I, too, got burned by the Safari 13 / 1Password 6 double whammy on an iMac running High Sierra. I don't want 1Password 7, and they are no longer offering a Safari browser extension for 1Password 6. Even if I could downgrade Safari back to 12, I still could no longer get the browser extension.

Luckily, my usual browsing computer is a MacBook Air running Mojave. I don't have auto-update turned on for that, so I can stick with Safari 12 for a while. Because of the 64-bit thing, I was considering not moving to macOS 10.15. This is yet another argument against upgrading.

In the meanwhile, on my iMac, I can always use Chrome or Firefox, for which there are still 1Password browser extensions.

I, too, got burned by the Safari 13 / 1Password 6 double whammy on an iMac running High Sierra. I don't want 1Password 7, and they are no longer offering a Safari browser extension for 1Password 6. Even if I could downgrade Safari back to 12, I still could no longer get the browser extension

I did pull Safari 12.x from Time Machine, but the 1Password 6 extension didn't come with it. I then pulled the entire Safari extensions folder (which included a file named 1Password.safarietz) back from ~/Library, but that didn't work either. I then pulled the entire Safari folder back from ~/Library, but no-go there either.

I've done a little poking around and tried a different ad blocker - AdGuard for Safari. (adguard.com/en/adguard-safari/overview.html). Initially I installed it in Safari 12 to check it worked on YouTube, first disabling uBlock Origin, and it seemed OK. So I took a chance and installed Safari 13 and it continues to work. I have 1Password 7, so that issue doesn't concern me. The other App Store ad blockers I have tried were AdBlock.app and Ka-Block!.app, but they didn't work on YouTube for me. AdGuard has one other feature I like which was also present in uBlock Origin, the ability to block an element on a page. On a 13" screen a website that has a large banner across every page means there is little space for reading the content, so it's nice to be able to be rid of it. I've no connection to any of the above products other than as a user.

MacInTouch

I'm always a little concerned about security issues with low-level software originating from Russia, and AdGuard was blocked at one point by Apple for using a VPN mechanism that could potentially provide unchecked access to very sensitive information. Other companies were also affected, and Russia doesn't have any monopoly on malware or spyware, so these may not be concerns for other people, but I thought I'd mention them as background for anyone who might be interested.

If users have moved to a new ad blocker that they downloaded from the App Store, then it may not be actually blocking all the ads, as users expect.

At this point, as many have pointed out, Firefox for Mac may be the only solution for running an ad blocker on macOS these days, while there's no way of using an older ad blocker on iOS, regardless of browser.

Google Chrome for Mac still supports ad blockers, but it's currently unclear if they'll do so in the future. But that's another can of worms.